The Frontiersman From Lout to Hero.

Subtitled "Notes on the Significance of the Comparative Method and the Stage Theory in Early American Literature and Culture," this essay treats the emergence of the frontiersman as a heroic figure during the 18th century. Seventeenth and early 18th-century observers thought frontiersmen an unruly and immoral people, too much like the Indians which their own ethnocentriam denounced. But by the 19th century the frontiersman emerges as a hero, the vanguard of a glorious civilization. Americans now believed that the story of civilization was one of progress rather than one of degeneration. Primary and secondary sources; 101 notes.